Reparations

There was an episode of “All in The Family” where ‘the meathead’ lost out of a university job to a black man, due to affirmative action. The person hiring said to meathead (I’m paraphrasing) “Due discrimination against black people in America, it may be necessary for a short period of time for discrimination in their favor”. This was in the 70s, and that seemed right to me. Not for some sort of compensation for slavery–the 350,000-400,000 deaths of white men for the Union and the money sunk probably covered that debt. No, it was for what came after reconstruction. “Affirmative action” was not a new thing–it had been practiced by the Irish, Italians , Germans and every other ethnic group in America. When they first came it was “No Irish Need Apply” signs. But when there were enough to take over local governments, often in coalition with other ethic groups, who do you think got the government jobs and contracts? Before the 70s, there was always one group (black people) who were excluded from these coalitions. Affirmative action was the right kind of reparations (it should have been for black people only, and time limited–say 25 or 50 years–Anne Coulter and I are on the same page). But it became a means to power for democrat politicians. They included Hispanics, women, Asians, and now with Biden, homosexuals.

“Affirmative action” was not a new thing–it had been practiced by the Irish, Italians , Germans and every other ethnic group in America. When they first came it was “No Irish Need Apply” signs. But when there were enough to take over local governments, often in coalition with other ethic groups, who do you think got the government jobs and contracts? Before the 70s, there was always one group (black people) who were excluded from these coalitions.

Public sector employees currently account for about 14% of the working population. It would have been considerably lower during the spoils system era. (The ratio of public expenditure to domestic product was < 0.10 in 1929). The federal government instituted civil service examinations in 1885 or thereabouts. I’ve seen in print estimates that about 20% of all positions in the federal executive used to change hands with a new administration (as opposed to < 0.2% today). A narrower and narrower segment of public sector employment was distributed by ward heelers over the period running from 1885 to 1965. Also, blacks were not cut out of federal patronage; one factor in the alienation of blacks from the Republican Party ca. 1930 was the Hoover administration reducing the number of patronage jobs to Southern blacks, in hopes of building a clientele among Southern whites. See also the Chicago machine founded by Anton Cermak, which had its corps of black alderman and precinct captains where blacks predominated. (See the career of Wm. Dawson in particular).

That aside, proper procedures in recruitment and promotion in public employment have been subject to a great deal of ruin in the last 50-odd years, and one vector influencing that has been race patronage. Look also at college admissions. Twenty-odd years ago, Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom sifted through the data institutions were willing to part with and concluded that about 30% of the back law students in the United States would not have been admitted to any law school absent special preferences and that many of the remainder had landed berths at schools where they were ill-matched to their peers. Legal education is a small segment of the enrollment. You look at baccalureate enrollments in general, you can see that 30% to 50% of the black students admitted would not be considered college material were they some other race. The Educational Testing Service was in 1995 buffaloed into rejiggering their scoring system so as to be more opaque and now institutions are discarding standardized tests entirely. People serious about their vocations do no do that. Our elites stink, and higher education may well be the worst of all.

True, Art Deco, about FEDERAL patronage. But state and local patronage to political supporters was larger and more important to the uplift of immigrant group. In the area where I grew up (near Biloxi, Miss) people from the Dalmatian coast (now Croatia) were brought in, dirt poor, to work in the fishing/canning industries in the late 1800s. By about the 1940s or so, they in coalition with the Italians and the Irish, were the political power in the Biloxi area. They hired the public school teachers, police and firemen, and got the contracts to build and repair roads and provide other public services. True there was a tiny number of federal patronage jobs that occasionally blacks were appointed but compared to local, they were nothing. And a word about local politicians like Dawson, who were in with democrat machine politicians. I can point to the similar example of Marion Berry in Washington DC in the 1980s and 1990s. He TALKED a good game and he and his supporters pointed to set-aside programs for contractors and summer jobs programs for black high school students, but he geared ALL of that toward his own political power, and opened such contracts and jobs to Hispanics, women, Asians, and NEVER even tried to make the case that they should be opened only to black people, as compensation for 150 years of Jim Crow restrictions. And I’m not saying you’re wrong about the quality of people given the jobs or preference for college admissions. Glenn Loury and John McWhorter make the case that lowering standards help NO ONE but the politicians, and that black students that may have done fine in a HBCU or state university shouldn’t be encouraged by lower standards to go to Iveys or other schools where they fail.

Well, take a look at this. Our Republican majority general assembly & governor are just fine with racial & ethnic quotas in our state’s public & charter schools when it comes to hiring classroom teachers & administrators. This was passed into law this spring. The practical result of this bill will be that those with pale skin & who are red blooded Americans will be hired dead last for these public jobs regardless of qualifications.

https://www.arkleg.state.ar.us/Bills/Detail?id=SB524&ddBienniumSession=2021%2F2021R